Abstract (eng)
The concept and idea of so-called "new wars" refer to a specific form of armed conflict, which has not only become influential for all global war events in the course of the 1980s, but especially so after the end of the confrontation between East and West and in the context of advancing globalization and state failure. These armed conflicts are significantly distinguished by their very specific characteristics in multiple regard concerning classical state wars as well as civil wars. Thus the permanent structural change of war, as postulated by Carl of Clausewitz in the 19th century, seems to have lost nothing of his validity to this day.
In the case of armed conflict within Angola between 1992 and 2002, various elements of the "new wars" could be identified as well. So it happened that the Angolan state failure paved the way for a higher incidence of private or non-state force protagonists, while the MPLA and the UNITA used the historically constituted identity-related differences among the people to mobilize supporters and support for their respective aims, goals and objectives. But also other characteristics of the "new wars", such as the financing strategies of the actors in the conflict, who were financed by the continuous inflow of resources from outside as well as by various forms of internal social transfers of assets, could be observed in the Angolan war. Despite the fact that the characteristics of the "new wars" dominate in the armed conflict dealt with in this thesis, the Angolan war cannot ultimately be classified as such a "new war". Rather, it ought to be subsumed under the notion of internationalized civil war.